Cologne is a city uniquely shaped by war. Surrounded by massive medieval city walls, it was contested by armies in epoch-making pitched battles, and almost completely destroyed by Allied carpet bombing in World War II. Today, it is a destination for refugees from military conflicts elsewhere. How has war inscribed itself in the city’s topography? What stories does it leave behind, and what happens when those stories overlap with experiences of other, more distant conflicts? Such are the question posed by Mareike Theile and Dominik Müller in their project Urban War Stories. In performative guided tours on six Sundays, the project takes its participants through eyewitness accounts of Cologne’s bombing and Hitler’s plans for Cologne’s reconstruction all the way back to the Napoleonic Wars and into the present, where the city is many things at once: a playground of portals for virtual war gamers, a hub of the arms industry, or an obstacle course of institutions for refugees.

Mareike Theile and Dominik Müller, both theater researchers and active in theater collectives of the Freie Szene, met in 2011. He works for Impulse Theater Festival, she at the Theater an der Ruhr. Urban War Stories is their first joint project.